So far, this series on content for the B2B Sales and Marketing Funnel has focused on materials that lead customers and prospects to take notice, to consider, and to evaluate a company’s offerings. For example, we’ve discussed how Awareness-stage content should make prospects aware of your business and its products or services, why Consideration-stage content must encourage them to view your company as a credible supplier and its offerings as potential solutions, and how Preference-stage content needs to convince them that your offerings are the best solutions to their problems.
The information-gathering and appraisal stages of the Sales and Marketing Funnel stages are integral to effective B2B marketing, in particular, when the end-goal is the sale of costly capital equipment or great quantities of finished components or raw material–purchases typically preceded by significant periods of review, evaluation, and reflection on the part of buyers. However, much as in life–where unless one is a philosopher or an academic–reflection must eventually give way to execution, a B2B prospect’s pre-purchase research must eventually lead to an actual transaction. Consequently, content geared to the Sales and Marketing Funnel’s Purchase stage should incite the prospect to buy and at last become a customer.
The greatest difference between Purchase stage content and earlier stage content is that not only must it push the prospect further along in the sales process it must also be geared to trigger the process’s positive conclusion. As such, even when Purchase stage content doesn’t directly ask for the order, it should include a call-to-action that induces a prospect to make a commitment that could lead to purchase. This can be a call with a telephone salesperson, a chat with an online representative, an appointment with a field salesperson, or the placement of a web order, among other possibilities–what is important is that it be designed to move prospects closer to buying your company’s offerings.
The types of content deployed at the Purchase stage vary widely within and across business areas. They can range from digital “punch out catalogs,” system configurators and cost-estimators in manufacturing and industrial sectors through printed, online catalogs, attire-sizing tools, and “drip” email promotions in online and brick-and-mortar retail, to give only a few examples. Whatever the Purchase stage content type, though, its defining characteristic is–as indicated above–the customer call-to-action, especially, the call-to-purchase. As such, perhaps the most important guideline to keep in mind when developing Purchase stage content is the maxim, “You don’t ask, you don’t get.” It’s hardly new advice but it’s sound advice, and, in that respect, ageless.
In my next post and final post in this series on developing content oriented to the Marketing and Sales Funnel, I’ll review which types of marketing content and vehicles are best suited to each phase of the funnel, from Awareness and Consideration through Preference and Purchase.
Please see parts 1, 2, 3, and 4 of this article series on content marketing at GF&Z’s blog “Perspectives in Global B2B Marketing,” on www.globalmarcomm.com.
Ronald-Stéphane Gilbért, Global and Content Marketing Practice Director— Gilbért, Flossmann & Zhang Worldwide, Cleveland